living with the T2 chip – The Eclectic Light Company

Six months ago, the chances of getting a new Mac with a T2 chip were smart: only if you handed over a great deal of money for an iMac Pro would you get one. Now, most New Macs come equipped with a T2 – MacBook Air, MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, Mac Mini, and of course the iMac Pro. This article looks at some of the most obvious changes that you will notice when you start using your new Mac with its T2 chip.

The most obvious thing is that you will not see any difference. There's no splash screen to say that your Mac has a T2, and in normal use there's nothing noticeably different.

Recovery mode

On many Macs with Startup in Recovery mode, try installing Linux using Boot Camp, or try starting up from an external drive, and the T2 will make its presence. T2 chips, entering Recovery mode is much slower. Unless you're using the built-in keyboard of a laptop model, you'll almost certainly have to connect your wireless keyboard to your Mac using its charging lead, so that it is available via USB rather than Bluetooth.

The newest option, the T2-specific Startup Security Utility is not shown in those options. Then you'll probably be holding Command-R forever before your Mac finally displays the default options for recovery. , but is opened from the menubar.

If you want to run Windows using Boot Camp, you can do that under Full Security provided that you use the latest version of Boot Camp Assistant to set it up. This allows the T2 to trust Microsoft's signed code during startup, and enter Windows properly.

Unfortunately, this is not the case for Linux and other operating systems that you may want to install in a Boot Camp partition or an external drive. When things go wrong Off, into No Security and if necessary allow boot from external media.

When disaster strikes a Mac with a T2 chip, it can be more serious than without one. If your T2 chip dies, it takes with it its Secure Enclave, and all hope of recovering the disk (s) it has encrypted. Dette gjør det enda vigtigere at du har gode backup til en ekstern disk. With or without FileVault enabled, you should consider encrypting that backup using FileVault.

The time is that, a Time Machine backup volume must be in HFS + and can not use APFS encryption. If you start making backups to an unencrypted volume, Time Machine will warn you that you are backing up encrypted data to an unencrypted backup, and offer FileVault for you.

Laptops

When Ved hjelp av en MacBook Pro med en Touch Bar, kan du selvfølgelig bruke Touch ID, som også fungerer på samme måde som iOS-enheter. As the T2 chip also has special image processing capabilities, there is speculation that Apple may add the option of Face ID in the future, which would of course be more widely applicable.

One final benefit worth noting is that the T2 disconnects your Mac's microphone in hardware when a laptop's member is closed. As a member closure also physically obstructs the camera, this prevents software from eavesdropping when a MacBook Pro or Air is shut.